One story that sticks in our minds is that of a woman who is still on the scheme today. She talks of being locked in a room and being forced to sell sex until she finally worked out that she might never get out of there alive. She climbed out of the window, onto a balcony; this was a property in West London with several floors and she basically jumped from the top floor to the balcony below. In doing so she damaged her back quite badly and also damaged her leg.
At the same time there was a construction worker opposite who had seen her jump, who came over to her with a ladder and helped her to climb down. She was terrified of him and literally ran what she thinks is probably a few miles. She was in West London and was eventually picked up in Camden and so had run or walked all that way with quite severe injuries.
People tend to talk glibly about prostitution as ‘the oldest profession’. We don’t believe that: for us, it’s the oldest oppression.
The nineteen-year-old English Sarah Forsyth works at a crèche in a provincial town who comes to the Netherlands in the mid-nineties, assuming she is going to work as a crechem employee. One day she sees an advertisement: “Leaders wanted for a daycare in Amsterdam”. She is ready for some adventure and reacts immediately. After a serious application procedure she is accepted. It seems like a dream. That dream turns into a nightmare at the moment that Sarah arrives at Schiphol. The people who pick her up push her into a car, take her passport under threat and drive straight to the Amsterdam Red Light District. There she is put behind the window without mercy. Her kidnappers have no misunderstanding about it: if she tries to escape, that will kill her.
She was forced to work as a prostitute at the Amsterdam Red Light District. A horrible nightmare that lasts one and a half years, in which Sarah becomes addicted to crack and a girl for a snuff movie is murdered. She does not dare escape. And Sarah Forsyth has experienced so much trouble: she has been sexually abused by her father since her third and later in the homes where she ended up. After a year and a half on the Red Light District, Sarah manages to escape and run into a police station. She is taken care of by a special police task unit and returns to England. Her kidnappers end up behind the bars, Sarah herself leads a more or less normal life after years of trial and error.
The experience of trafficked women given refuge by the Poppy Project makes clear that Sarah Forsyth’s story is all too typical of the modern face of sex slavery. Only two differences mark her out: the fact that she is a young British woman with the ability to tell her story clearly to a British audience; and that she was trafficked from Britain, rather than into it. But as the research for that Roger Cook documentary deepened, the picture that emerged threw a revealing light on this second difference.
Certainly, there appeared to be persuasive evidence of trafficking into British brothels from overseas. In 2007 reliable estimates suggested that 80 per cent of prostitutes in British brothels were non-UK nationals – a complete reversal of the position five years earlier when the figures showed that 80 per cent were British women.
But there were also worrying signs that the UK was becoming a noticeable exporter of women to the sex trade in Europe and Asia. According to charity workers trying to help women escape from prostitution, the threat of trafficking was not confined to foreign nationals.